Page 89 of The Paradise Problem

I smile, pushing the mess of hair out of her face. “I was wondering when you’d ask.”

She curls up on her side facing me and reaches beneath her head, adjusting her pillow under her cheek. “I figure we’re past the point of pretending to be surface-level bros.”

This makes me laugh. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She stares at me, brown eyes luminous in the moonlight streaming across the bed. Anna traces a finger down my throat, bringing her hand to rest over my heart.

I lift it, kissing her palm, before putting it back where it was. “We leave soon.”

“I know.”

“And if it’s okay, I’d like to keep seeing you.”

She laughs. “I know you didn’t mean to, but that’s almost word for word what Richard Gere says in Pretty Woman before everything goes to shit.”

“I think there are some important differences here you may be overlooking.”

Anna squints at me. “Are we sure?”

Laughing, I reach around her back, pulling her flush to me. “I want to keep this going, whatever it is.”

“So maybe you fly to LA and take me on a date sometime.”

I lean in, resting my lips against hers, swallowing down the absurd, impulsive thought that wants to shove its way out of my throat: Come live with me. Instead, I say, “Anytime you want me.”

She pulls back, ruthlessly biting her smiling bottom lip. “Okay.”

And that easily, something ancient inside me settles.

With a deep breath, I reach forward, running my thumb over her lip, freeing it. “You know I was close to my grandfather.”

She nods. “He was your favorite.”

“Right. But he was also… a little unorthodox.”

“Another word only rich people use.”

I roll to my back, tucking a hand behind my head, and stare up at the ceiling, mentally sifting through what I can tell her. “Family was very important to him.”

“Yeah. You mentioned that to me the first day you came over—sounds like there’s a lot more buried in there.”

I laugh quietly. “Yeah.”

She reaches forward, tracing my Adam’s apple with her fingertip. “Like what?”

“The thing about legal trusts is you can put whatever you want in them. Any stipulation.” She waits for me to say more, dragging her hand down to rest over my sternum. I set my own hand on top of hers.

“I was only fifteen when Grandpa died. We were all at the reading of the will, but you can imagine in a situation like that, especially for kids, a lot of the details sort of go over your head. The reading took hours. I understood, basically, that he was leaving us each a very large sum of money. I understood that it was contingent on us being married. At the time, it didn’t seem so weird that he would want that. Kids sort of take those adult directives as law.”

“I can see that,” she says quietly.

“About three years ago, pretty soon after I moved out of our apartment, I created a foundation. The annual deposits from the trust go directly to this fund.”

“Like a charity?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“So—wait—you’re not keeping your inheritance money?”

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